Two Girls Singing 

	It neither was the words nor yet the tune. 
	Any tune would have done and any words. 
	Any listener or no listener at all. 

	As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning 
5	in its own world of strange awakening 
	or larks for no reason but themselves. 

	So on the bus through late November running 
	by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling, 
	the two girls sang for miles and miles together 

10	and it wasnt the words or tune. It was the singing. 
	It was the human sweetness in that yellow, 
	the unpredicted voices of our kind.

Halloween 
	Someone was playing the piano when quite suddenly 
	there they were standing in the room. 
	They would not sing or speak or tell their names. 
	Their skull faces blankly shifted around 
5	as if they were studying us implacably. 
	Yokels, one said. Rustics, said another, 
	and truly they had come in out of the rain 
	with their masks tall and white and bony-looking. 
	Macbeth, someone said, and someone, Hamlet. 
10	Or perhaps at least the Elegy by Gray. 
	The rain drummed on the roof and they were gone 
	in their muddy boots, squelching past cowering doors. 
	We looked at each other. It was graveyard time 
	as our black ties on our white shirts might say.

The Exiles 
(translated from the authors own Gaelic) 

	The many ships that left our country 
	with white wings for Canada. 
	They are like handkerchiefs in our memories 
	and the brine like tears 
5	and in their masts sailors singing 
	like birds on branches. 
	That sea of May running in such a blue, 
	a moon at night, a sun at daytime, 
	and the moon like a yellow fruit, 
10	like a plate on a wall 
	to which they raise their hands 
	like a silver magnet 
	with piercing rays 
	streaming into the heart. 
At the Firth of Lorne 

	In the cold orange light we stared across 
	to Mull and far Tiree. 
	A setting sun emblazoned your bright knee 
	to a brilliant gold to match your hairs gold poise.
 
5	Nothing has changed: the world was as it was 
	a million years ago. The slaty stone 
	slept in its tinged and aboriginal iron. 
	The sky might flower a little, and the grass

	perpetuate its sheep. But from the sea 
10	the bare bleak islands rose, beyond the few 
	uneasy witticisms we let pursue 
	their desolate silences. There was no tree
 
	nor other witness to the looks we gave 
	each other there, inhuman as if tolled 
15	by some huge bell of iron and gold, 
	I no great Adam and you no bright Eve.







Old Woman 

	And she, being old, fed from a mashed plate 
	as an old mare might droop across a fence 
	to the dull pastures of its ignorance. 
	Her husband held her upright while he prayed 

5	to God who is all-forgiving to send down 
	some angel somewhere who might land perhaps 
	in his foreign wings among the gradual crops. 
	She munched, half dead, blindly searching the spoon. 

	Outside, the grass was raging. There I sat 
10	imprisoned in my pity and my shame 
	that men and woman having suffered time 
	should sit in such a place, in such a state 

	and wished to be away, yes, to be far away 
	with athletes, heroes, Greeks or Roman men 
15	who pushed their bitter spears into a vein 
	and would not spend an hour with such decay. 

	Pray God, he said, we ask you, God, he said. 
	The bowed back was quiet. I saw the teeth 
	tighten their grip around a delicate death. 
20	And nothing moved within the knotted head 

	but with only a few poor veins as one might see 
	vague wishless seaweed floating on a tide 
	of all the salty waters where had died 
	too many waves to mark two more or three.
The Iolaire 

	The green washed over them. I saw them when 
	the New Year brought them home. It was a day 
	that orbed the horizon with an enigma. 
	It seemed that there were masts. It seemed that men 
5	buzzed in the water round them. It seemed that fire 
	shone in the water which was thin and white 
	unravelling towards the shore. It seemed that I 
	touched my fixed hat which seemed to float and then 
	the sun illumined fish and naval caps, 
10	names of the vanished ships. In sloppy waves, 
	in the fat of the water, they came floating home 
	bruising against their island. It is true 
	a minor error can inflict this death, 
	that star is not responsible. It shone 
15	over the puffy blouse, the flapping blue 
	trousers, the black boots. The seagulls swam 
	bonded to the water. Why not man? 
	The lights were lit last night, the tables creaked 
	with hoarded food. They willed the ship to port 
20	in the New Year which would erase the old, 
	its errant voices, its unpractised tones. 
	Have we done ill, I ask? My sober hat
	floated in the water, my fixed body 
	a simulacrum of the transient waste, 
25	for everything that was mobile, planks that swayed, 
	the keeling ships exploding, and the splayed 
	cold insect bodies. I have seen your church 
	solid. This is not. The water pours 
	into the parting timbers where I ache 
30	above the globular eyes. The slack heads turn 
	ringing the horizon without a sound 
	with mortal bells, a strange exuberant flower 
	unknown to our dry churchyards. I look up. 
	The sky begins to brighten as before, 
35	remorseless amber, and the bruised blue grows 
	at the erupting edges. I have known you, God, 
	not as the playful one but as the black 
	thunderer from hills. I kneel 
	and touch this dumb blonde head. My hand is scorched. 
40	Its human quality confuses me. 
	I have not felt such hair so dear before 
	nor seen such real eyes. I kneel from you. 
	This water soaks me. I am running with 
	its tart sharp joy. I am floating here. 
45	In my black uniform, I am embraced 
	by these green ignorant waters. I am calm.


Gaelic Songs 

	I listen to these songs 
	from a city studio. 
	They belong to a different country, 
	to a barer sky, 
5	to a district of heather and stone. 
	They belong to the sailors 
	who kept their course 
	through nostalgia and moonlight. 
	They belong to the maidens 
10	who carried the milk in pails 
	home in the twilight. 
	They belong to the barking of dogs, 
	to the midnight of stars, 
	to the seas terrible force, 
15	exile past the equator. 
	They belong to the sparse grass, 
	to the wrinkled faces, 
	to the houses sunk in the valleys, 
	to the mirrors 
20	brought home from the fishing.

	Now they are made of crystal 
	taking just a moment 
	between two programmes 
	elbowing them fiercely 
25	between two darknesses.


Youll take a bath 

	And now youll take a bath, shed always say, 
	just when I was leaving, to keep me back. 
	At the second turning of the stony stair 
	the graffiti were black letters in a book 
5	misspelt and menacing. As I drove away 
	shed wave from the window. How could I always bear 
	to be her knight abandoning her to her tower 
	each second Sunday, a ghost that was locked fast 
	in a Council scheme, where radios played all day 
10	unknown raw music, and young couples brought 
	friends home to midnight parties, and each flower 
	in the grudging garden died in trampled clay. 
 
	Standing by her headstone in the mild 
	city of bell-less doors, I feel the sweat 
15	stink my fresh shirt out, as each gravelly path 
	becomes a road, long lost, in a bad bet. 
	Once more I see the dirty sleepy child. 
	The waters hot enough. Youll have a bath. 
 
	And almost I am clean but for that door 
20	so blank and strong, imprinted with her name 
	as that far other in the scheme was once, 
	and scheme becomes a mockery, and a shame, 
	in this neat place, where each vase has its flower, 
	and the arching window its maternal stance. 
At the Sale 
	Old beds, old chairs, old mattresses, old books. 
	Old pictures of coiffed women, hatted men, 
	ministers with clamped lips and flowing beards, 
	a Duke in his Highland den, 
5	and, scattered among these, old copper fire-guards, 
	stone water-bottles, stoves and shepherds crooks. 

	How much goes out of fashion and how soon! 
	The double-columned leather-covered tomes 
	recall those praying Covenantors still 
10	adamant against Romes 
	adamant empire. Every article 
	is soaked in time and dust and sweat and rust. What tune 

	warbled from that phonograph? Who played 
	that gap-toothed dumb piano? Who once moved 
15	with that white chamber pot through an ancient room? 
	And who was it that loved 
	to see her own reflection in the gloom 
	of that webbed mirror? And who was it that prayed 

	holding that Bible in her fading hands? 
20	The auctioneers quick eyes swop on a glance, 
	a half-seen movement. In the inner ring 
	a boy in a serious stance 
	holds up a fan, a piece of curtaining, 
	an hour-glass with its trickle of old sand.

25	We walk around and find an old machine. 
	On one side pump, an another turn a wheel. 
	But nothing happens. Whats this object for? 
	Imagine how we will 
	endlessly pump and turn for forty years 
30	and then receive a pension, smart and clean, 

	climbing to a dias to such loud applause 
	as shakes the hall for toiling without fail 
	at this strange nameless gadget, pumping, turning, 
	each day oiling the wheel 
35	with zeal and eagerness and freshness burning 
	in a happy country of anonymous laws, 
	grow older as we look, the pictures fade, 
	the stone is changed to rubber, and the wheel 
	elaborates its rayed 
40	brilliance and complexity and we feel 
	the spade becomes a scoop, cropping the grass, 
 
	and the flesh itself becomes unnecessary. 
	O hold me, love, in this appalling place. 
	Let your hand stay me by this mattress here 
45	and this tall ruined glass, 
	by this dismembered radio, this queer 
	machine that waits and has no history.
You Lived in Glasgow 
	You lived in Glasgow many new years ago. 
	I do not find your breath in the air. 
	It was, I think, in the long-skirted thirties 
	when idle men stood at every corner 
5	chewing their fag-ends of a failed culture. 
	Now I sit here in George Square 
	when the War Memorials yellow sword glows bright 
	and the white stone lions mouth at bus and car. 
	A maxi-skirted girl strolls slowly by. 
10	I turn and look. It might be you. But no. 
	Around me theres a 1970 sky. 

	Everywhere there are statues. Stone remains. 
	The mottled flesh is transient. On those trams, 
	invisible now but to the mind, you bore 
15	your groceries home to the 1930 slums. 
	There was such warmth, you said. The gaslight hums 
	and large caped shadows tremble on the stair. 
	Now everything is brighter. Pale ghosts walk 
	among the spindly chairs, the birchen trees. 
20	In lights of fiercer voltage you are less 
	visible than when in winter you 
	walked, a black figure, through the gaslight blue. 

	The pasts an experience that we cannot share. 
	Flat-capped Glaswegians and the Music Hall. 
25	Apples and oranges on an open stall. 
	A day in the country. And the sparkling Clyde
	splashing its local sewage at the wall. 
	This April day shakes memories in a shade 
	opening and shutting like a parasol. 
30	There is no site for the unshifting dead. 
	Youre buried elsewhere though your flickering soul 
	is a constant tenant of my tenement. 
 
	You were happier here than anywhere, you said. 
	Such fine good neighbours helping when your child 
35	almost died of croup. Those pleasant Wildes 
	removed with the fallen rubble have now gone 
	in the building programme which renews each stone. 
	I stand in a cleaner city, better fed, 
	in my diced coat, brown hat, paler hands 
40	leafing a copy of the latest book. 
	Dear ghosts, I love you, haunting sunlit winds, 
	dear happy dented ghosts, dear prodigal folk. 
 
	I left you, Glasgow, at the age of two 
	and so you are my birthplace just the same. 
45	Divided city of the green and blue 
	I look for her in you, my constant aim 
	to find a ghost within a close who speaks 
	in Highland Gaelic. 
				The bulldozer breaks 
	raw bricks to powder. Boyish workmen hang 
50	like sailors in tall rigging. Buildings sail 
	into the future. The old songs you sang 
	fade in their pop songs, scale on dizzying scale.